Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment, as examples. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
There is a trend in the semiconductor industry towards reducing the size of features, e.g., the circuits, elements, conductive lines, vias, and contacts, of semiconductor devices, in order to improve the performance of the semiconductor devices, reduce power consumption, and meet smaller packaging requirements, for example. However, as feature sizes of semiconductor devices diminish, the patterning of features becomes more challenging. The transfer of patterns of lithography masks to semiconductor devices having small feature sizes may be inaccurate or unpredictable in some applications, for example. Furthermore, minimum feature sizes are limited based on resolution limits of lithography systems, processes, and materials used in lithography, for example.
Thus, what are needed in the art are improved methods of patterning features of semiconductor devices.